Wilhelm K . Essler ON ABSOLUTENESS AND RELATIVITY : Modern Philosophy in Ancient Times

Within this short paper I do not intend to compare systems of philosophies; rather, I am trying here to compare kinds of philosophizing, hereby not all of its main aspects but its core, namely: whether or not some philosophizing is related to some fix-point, so to speak: to some Archimedean point, and thereby, whether or not such philosophizing is leading to a closed system of philosophy. In order to get a clean understanding of the cores of the kinds of modern philosophizing, it is unavoidable to gain a suitable amount of profound knowledge of Ancient Greek philosophies and its kinds of philosophizing; and in order to get a clean understanding of the cores of the kinds of Ancient Greek philosophizing, it is unavoidable to gain a suitable amount of profound knowledge of Ancient Indian philosophies and its kinds of philosophizing. This presupposes that not only mathematical disciplines but also systems of philosophies and kinds of philosophizing were traded from East to West during the centuries; and, according to my historical knowledge as well as to my viewing a tremendous amount of similarities among the philosophies at consecutive times, this really happened. With regard to that object, which nowadays at our universities is called „philosophy“, its birth place is – and surely will remain – unknown to us. And, most probably, there was not the one birth place of philosophizing at this earth; quite on the contrary, it is highly probable that a lot of alternative former traditions of philosophies never reached our eras. As far as we can see nowadays, the earliest sources of philosophizing are to be found in Ancient India, more exactly: at the area of its Ganges plain. Within about three centuries around 800 B.C., a remarkable large number of philosophical systems was born there, whose parents were – most probable – the views of the priests of the Arian immigrating conquerers in its coming-together with the views of the priests of the Dravidian original inhabitants. Unfortunately, in almost all cases the philosophical texts traded to our days are just extended summaries of those former philosophies, mostly without references to the authors of them and to the respective periods of their teachings. During the centuries after this establishing of sophisticated philosophies in Ancient India, the first series of trading and transmitting philosophies from India to the West took place, namely to philosophers of Ancient Greece like Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Platon. The second series of that kind took place about two thousand years later, when sailors and businessmen of the East Indian Company started to bring precious things from India to England as well as later on from England to Germany and even to Russia; and among these precious things were, from the 18th century on, translations of Sanskrit-texts. But at that periods, businessmen were not so narrow-minded as they are presenting themselves nowadays; for their oral trading of cultural and religious backgrounds of Medieval Indian culture was by far not less important for curious listeners at home, be it London or be it Koenigsberg. Therefore, it will be worthwhile to investigate the gross as well as the subtle relations esp. of Indian idealistic-phenomenalistic philosophies of India with those of Europe from the 18th century onward, starting with Berkeley and Kant, but not ending with Mach and Wittgenstein. Among the remarkable Western philosophers of modern times, Schopenhauer was the first one – and, as far as I can see, the only one – who confessed tobe influenced by Ancient Indian philosophy in general and by Buddhist philosophy in particular. And the influence of Ancient Indian philosophy to German philosophy increased during the second half of the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. For at that period, long before Neumann's translations, more and more TheravādaBuddhist sūtras were translated from Pāli into German. At that time, Deussen started to translate the